So I finally had the bling to pick up 70-200 2.8 VR lens. I rented this lens on a trip to Europe in February and totally fell in love. Plus, now I have lenses covering everything from 12mm to 200mm. A 1.7 or 2 teleconverter may be in my future, but I think I'd replace my 18-70 first. Either one is a ways off though, as the ol' photo bank account just hit zero with this purchase. Anyway, I'll be posting photos taken with this beauty soon.

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First off, let me credit David over at www.strobist.com for the lighting ideas (homemade snoot anyone?) that allowed me to capture this shot yesterday. A little about the setup - Nikon D200 with my SB-600 off-camera, fired via Nikon's CLS. The duct tape looking thingy is my homemade cereal box snoot, which allows me to direct the flash output more precisely than otherwise. I zoomed the flash to 85mm and covered with is 1/2 CTO (color temperature orange) gel which gave me the nice warm color on the baseball. There's not much else to it, post-processing was minimal, just a touch of high pass sharpening and the image was complete.